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WIP Middle-Earth

I've decided to make a map of Tolkien's Middle Earth. A little ambitous, I know . I wanted to try out the colourfull style of my last map some more, and since I love Tolkien's woks, decided to give it a try.

It's going to be quite huge, since the massive amount of names which have to fit on it . I'm using an original version of Tolkien as base.

So far, I've only got the land & sea colours, the rivers and the forest (there actually not a lot of them, I'd never noticed before...)
Next are the mountains.

I refined the rivers (it's things like this that make my wish I had a tablet ) and redid the forests. The trees are a bit bigger, and they don't cover the rivers anymore.
Some of the other 'gaps' in the forests are meant for roads & mountains.

@Hohum; I used Ramah's tree brushes as a base, the colouring & shading is my own. (I did use his TreeThing application to create the forests, It's a bit difficult to get the open spaces for the rivers in the right place, but it beats putting the trees in one by one ).

Hi Saule,
I know what you mean by "huge". My original map (started in Illustrator) was 200 in x 200 in. I finished it in InDesign with thoughts of publishing it as an "interactive" map with bookmarks. The final result was dictated by computer hardware & software limitations for my targeted output. The map in now an iPad app (see the images in my gallery — if interested). I am currently working on the Second Age where the "Fall of Beleriand" and the rise of Númenor are shown. The map is available on the iTunes App Store... http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/middl...408301883?mt=8

Last edited by richardblum; 12-18-2010 at 08:52 AM.
Reason: The image URL wasn't working

Thanks for all the comments . It's been a while since I've worked on this. I'd started on the mountains, and found out there are actually quite a lot of them. Because my method of creating mountain basically consists of copy-pasting all the individual mountain pictures in place, I realised it was going to be a lot of work. I actually tried using Ramah's tree-thing for the mountains, but they came out too small. I didn't really feel like working on it for a while because the task seemed endless, but I've started again. 2 mountain ranges are now in place. I'm hoping to be able to start copy-pasting groups of mountains more and more as I get on, hopefully not having to put in every single thing by hand . (The lowest mountain range was how it would've come out if I'd used the tree thing for the mountains...)

For some reason the forum is not letting me upload the file, so here's a picture with a link to my DA gallery. The 'Download' butten at the right will give you the original size... (Does anyone know why I'd get a 'not a valid image file' error for a .jpg? )

Looks good so far Saule, and it's good to see you back at the Guild again! Hm, I'm not sure about the error message, I would guess it had something to do with the size of the image, but then that wouldn't explain the "not a valid file" message. Shrug.